The War That Saved My Life

  Mam pushed Jamie through the gate.

  Susan said, “No.”

  She said, “You don’t have to go. Ada. Jamie. You can stay with me. I’ll fix it. I promise. You can stay.”

  Mam scowled. “Think you can steal my kids, do you?”

  “I’ll go to the police,” Susan said. “They’ll listen to you, Ada. They’ll listen to us. You can stay.”

  The pause that followed this seemed to last a lifetime. Mam sucked in her breath. Jamie snuffled. I looked at Susan and I said, “You didn’t want us.”

  Susan looked straight back at me. She said, “That was last year. I want you now.”

  But Jamie was holding Mam’s hand. The police might let me stay with Susan, but they’d have no reason to take Jamie from Mam. Mam never locked Jamie up.

  I said, “I can’t leave Jamie.”

  Susan looked back at me and very slowly nodded. Mam muttered something under her breath. She yanked Jamie down the road. I followed. When I looked back Susan was already on the other side of the garden wall, unbuckling the girth of my saddle. She didn’t look up. She didn’t say good-bye.

  When we got to the end of the drive Mam stopped. “What’re those?” she said, pointing to my crutches.

  “I walk faster with them,” I said.

  She snorted. “Like you need to walk.”

  I said, “I can walk.”

  “Not for long, missy,” Mam said. “Not for long.”

  The train to London was even slower and more crowded than the one we’d been evacuated on. Servicemen sat on kit bags in the aisle. One man offered me a seat, because of my crutches, and Mam scowled at him and pushed past me to sit down. The man started to speak. “I’m fine standing,” I said quickly. “With my crutches—”

  I should have kept quiet. Mam’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know who gave you the idea it was all right to go out where people could see you,” she said, in a low, furious voice. “Flaunting your crippled self. You can use them things ’til we get home, and not a minute longer.”

  “But I can walk,” I said.

  “But I don’t want you to. You hear me?”

  I swallowed. It was worse than a nightmare.

  “Ada caught a spy,” Jamie whispered.

  Mam snorted. “Pull the other one,” she said.

  “Tell her, Ada,” Jamie said. “Tell her your hero story.”

  I kept my mouth shut and shook my head.

  It was late at night before we got off the train, and went stumbling through the inky blacked-out streets of London. I tripped over rough curbstones. The shadows made noises I didn’t remember, but the decaying smell rising from the damp streets was the same.

  Butter, I thought. Think of riding Butter.

  Mam had moved, she told us, to be closer to the factory where she now worked. “Plus it got me away from those titty-tatty neighbors with nothin’ nice to say. I’ve got a decent job now, even if it is still nights. You’ll like the new place. It won’t be posh like that rich old bat’s you were with, but it’s pretty fine.”

  “Susan’s not a rich old bat,” Jamie said.

  Oh, Jamie, I thought, shut up.

  “Sure she is now. Bet she pockets what she gets to take you in. Except, of course, for what she spent on those clothes. What’s that you’re wearing, anyhow, Ada? Pants?”

  “Riding jodhpurs,” I said, then immediately wished I hadn’t.

  “Oooh, fancy! What’s that called, when it’s at home?”

  “They’re just pants for riding,” I said. “They’re not posh. Posh ladies wear riding habits. And they didn’t cost anything. Susan made them.” She’d had to, when I’d worn out the pants Maggie gave me. And I should learn to shut up too, really I should.

  “Ooh, posh ladies wear riding habits, do they? Surprised you ain’t got one of those.”

  Susan had said she would make me one. She thought it would be fun.

  “You won’t be wearing pants in my house,” Mam said. “Tomorrow I’ll be taking those to the pawn shop and getting you something suitable. The cheek of her. Letting you out where people could see you.”

  “There’s nothing much wrong with me,” I said. “My foot’s a long way from my brain.”

  Slap!

  I fell backward, stumbling, scraping my elbow on something rough. For a moment I lost my crutches in the dark. Jamie helped me. Shut up, I thought. Shut up.

  Mam led us up three flights of stairs. Bare dim lightbulbs hung at each landing, throwing the stairwells into shadow. I saw something scutter out of view. A rat, I thought. I’d forgotten rats. I’d forgotten how the hallways smelled from the common toilets on each floor.

  Mam swung open a dirty wooden door. “Here we are,” she said.

  The flat was two small rooms. We walked into a room with a table, a sink, a gas ring, and some chairs. A thin rug on a linoleum floor.

  No cabinet under the sink. No cabinet big enough to stuff me into. I looked first thing.

  “Well?” Mam said.

  I swallowed. “Very nice,” I said.

  “Posh brat,” Mam said. “I can see I’m going to have to beat the toff outa you.” She picked up one of the chairs near the table. “We’ll put this right by the window,” she said. “That way you’ll be comfy, looking out.”

  What was I supposed to say? I no longer knew the right answers. “Thank you.”

  “I see we got Miss Manners living with us now. Thinks she’s too good for the rest of us.” Mam showed us the other room, containing our old wardrobe and a new bed. No sheets, just a rough blanket and a pillow and a mattress.

  Until we’d gone to live with Susan, I was used to beds like this. I would have thought the flat was fine. Fancy, even, with more than one room.

  “I had to take off work tonight to fetch you,” Mam said. “I’m going down to the pub for a pint. You two better go to sleep. Ada, I’ll find you a bucket.”

  It took me a moment to realize why she thought I needed a bucket. “I’d rather just use the toilet,” I said. “I usually do now.”

  Mam said, each word heavy and solid, “You ain’t going out of this room.

  “Got that?” she continued. “’Cause I don’t need the world shaming me for having a crippled girl. I don’t care what you did somewhere else. You’re with me again, you’ll do as I say. You disobey me, I’ll make you wish you hadn’t. You’re a cripple. That’s all you are. A cripple, and nothing but a cripple. You’ve never been anything else. Got that?”

  I said, “Susan wasn’t ashamed of me.”

  “Well, bully for her. She should have been.” Mam’s eyes glittered. “Disobey me,” she said, pointing at Jamie, “and I take it out on him. Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She went out. I looked at the door, and the bucket. I used the bucket.

  Jamie and I lay on the mattress in the hot bedroom. “I can’t sleep,” Jamie whimpered. “I need Bovril.”

  “Susan’ll take good care of him,” I whispered.

  “I need him,” Jamie said. “I can’t sleep.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  Jamie said, “What happened? Why’s Mam so angry?”

  “We look different,” I said.

  “So?”

  I took a deep breath. Part of me felt like it was all my fault, for being too posh, for getting above myself, for not being the sort of daughter Mam could love.

  For being a cripple.

  And yet . . . Mam could have fixed my foot. She could have fixed it when I was a baby, and she could fix it now. She didn’t want to.

  She wanted me to be a cripple.

  It didn’t make sense.

  The moon rose. I watched the patterns its light made on the ceiling. A cripple, and nothing but a cripple.

  “Jamie,” I said, pokin
g him, “I caught a spy.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And I learned to ride Butter, and we jumped the stone wall. Fred needs me.”

  “Mmmm,” said Jamie, rolling over.

  “And I can read and write, and knit, and sew. I helped the soldiers during Dunkirk week. And Maggie and Daisy like me,” I said.

  “Susan loves you,” Jamie said.

  “She loves both of us,” I said.

  “I know,” said Jamie. He sniffed. “I want Bovril.”

  I didn’t reply. I drifted off to sleep, sometime before Mam came home, and as I did, I thought one word. War.

  At last I understood what I was fighting, and why. And Mam had no idea how strong a fighter I’d become.

  In the morning Jamie had wet the bed. I’d half expected it, but Mam, sleeping on the other side of Jamie, was furious. She smacked his bottom hard and told him it’d better not happen again. “Else you’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.

  Jamie sobbed. He wasn’t used to being smacked anymore. “Quit crying,” I whispered, my arms around him. “You’ve got to. Crying makes it worse.” To Mam I said, “I’ll wash the blanket.” I reached to the floor for my crutches and my shoes.

  They were gone.

  Mam saw the look on my face. She laughed. “Missing your crutches, are you?”

  “Why didn’t you get me crutches when I was younger?” I asked.

  Mam snorted. “I told you,” she said. “I don’t want you going anywhere. I don’t want anyone to see you.”

  “But my foot could have been fixed. When I was a baby—”

  “Oh, so now you believe all that too? That’s what they said, those nurses, wanted me to spend money, wanted to take my baby and my money and put you in hospital for months, all my money, and nobody was going to tell me what to do with my money and my kid. Wouldn’t have worked anyhow. When you was a baby your foot wasn’t half as ugly as it is now.”

  I tried to absorb all this. But Jamie had thought of something else. “What about when the bombs come?” he asked. “Where’ll we go then? At home we had a shelter—” He stopped, his eyes widening with fear. I understood. It was a mistake to call Susan’s house home.

  But Mam didn’t notice. She just snorted. “Ain’t no bombs in London,” she said. “Haven’t been, not once, and the war’s been on a year.”

  It was a Saturday, but Mam said she’d be working that night. The factories ran around the clock. She dozed on the dry side of the bed while I toasted bread for breakfast and made tea. When she woke, she and Jamie went out to buy food. “Where’re your ration cards?” Mam asked.

  Susan had them. She would have given them to us, if Mam hadn’t been in such an all-fired hurry to leave.

  I played dumb. “Dunno,” I said. Jamie started to speak, but I glared at him and he closed his mouth on his words.

  Mam swore. “That idiot woman,” she said. “Probably trying to cheat me. Probably using all your coupons up right now, buying all the sugar and meat she can.”

  I said nothing. I went to the window, sat down on the chair, looked out. Nothing to see. No children playing in the streets. Sandbags up to the windows of the few shops. Women walking briskly, not sitting down on the stoops to gossip.

  War.

  Mam gave me a more congenial look. “You can’t help it,” she said, “but with a foot like that, there’s nothing useful you can do. You’ll be a cripple all your life.”

  When they left I became a spy. The flat was filthy, and I wanted to clean it, at the very least the sink and the floor, but I decided not to. Mam would notice and be angry. Better she thought I stayed in my chair.

  There weren’t many places to hide things. A few kitchen cupboards with the pots and plates Mam had had for years. Clothes in the wardrobe—new clothes, for Mam, and some older things too. A small table in the bedroom with a larger new mirror hung in front of it.

  My hair looked a mess. I brushed it with Mam’s hairbrush and plaited it neatly. My face was dirty, so I found a cloth and soap at the kitchen sink, and washed. I had to use the bucket again, but I moved it to the door and covered it with a plate to keep down the smell.

  Back to the table with the mirror. It had a drawer. The front of the drawer was a mess of bobby pins, pencil stubs, and odd scraps of paper. I pulled it all the way out. At the very back I found a small pasteboard box. Inside, a stack of papers.

  I unfolded the top one.

  Certificate of Birth, it said. Ada Maria Smith.

  I drew a deep breath. Scanned the paper quickly. Found what I was looking for. May 13, 1929.

  We’d gotten my birthday wrong, of course, but we’d guessed right on the year. I really was eleven.

  Jamie’s birth certificate was beneath mine. Beneath that, my parents’ marriage certificate.

  I heard a loud noise on the stairs. Jamie singing at the top of his lungs. Beautiful, beautiful Jamie. By the time Mam swung the door open I had the papers back where they belonged and was sitting placidly in my chair.

  For dinner Mam boiled potatoes and cabbage with a small piece of tough beef. She ate the beef herself, because, she said, until we had our ration books back we didn’t have the right to eat meat. “I’ll get that cat to send them,” she said. “Get the law on her, if I have to.”

  Jamie looked miserable and didn’t want to eat, but I piled his plate with vegetables. “They’re good,” I said encouragingly. “They tasted a little like the beef.”

  He eyed me. I winked. He stared at me for a while, then carefully ate everything on his plate.

  When Mam got up to leave for work, I took a deep breath. It was time. Now or never, I thought. “You don’t need us here,” I said. “You’re better off without having to take care of us, feed us and everything. You don’t really want us. Not even Jamie.”

  Jamie started to say something, but I kicked him underneath the table, hard, and he shut his mouth.

  Mam eyed me. “What’s all this? Some kind of trick?”

  “You never wanted us,” I said. “Not really. That’s why you didn’t send for us, when all the other mothers did.”

  “Don’t know what right you’ve got to complain about it,” she said. “You had a pretty high time out there from all I can see. Fancy clothes, fancy ideas, prancing around the town—”

  “It’s nothing to you what happens to us,” I said. “You only brought us back because you thought it would cost more to keep us away.”

  “And so it would have,” Mam said. “You saw that letter. Why should I pay for you to live better than me? When you’re nothing but a—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I worked hard to keep my voice quiet and even. I was going to have the truth said plainly. I was done with lies.

  “Nineteen shillings,” Mam said. “Nineteen shillings a week! When they first let you go away for free. You never cost me no nineteen shillings a week. It’s robbery, that’s what it is.”

  “If you don’t have to pay, you won’t care if we leave,” I said. “I can arrange that. We’ll go away and you won’t have to pay for anything.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you’re up to, girl. I don’t know where you got all these words. Talk, talk.”

  “I could get my foot fixed,” I said. “Even now. I don’t have to be a cripple. You don’t have to be ashamed of me.” A thought went through my head: Susan isn’t ashamed.

  Mam’s face turned red. “I’m never paying to fix your foot.”

  “It would have been easy to fix, when I was a baby.”

  “Oh, that’s lies! You can’t believe what people say! Lies! I told your father—”

  My father. I’d read about him in the newspaper clipping in Mam’s drawer. I said, slowly, “He would have fixed me.” It was a guess.

  “He wanted to,” Mam said. “He was the one that wanted babies. It was
him always rocking you, singing to you.”

  I felt tears dripping down my cheeks. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. I said, “You never wanted us. You don’t want us now.”

  Mam’s eyes blazed. She said, “You’re right, I don’t.”

  “You never wanted us,” I said.

  “And why would I?” Mam said. “It was all him, calling me unnatural, wanting babies all the time. Then I got stuck with a cripple. And then a baby. And then no husband. I never wanted either of you.”

  Jamie made a little noise. I knew he was crying but I couldn’t look at him yet. I said, “So you don’t need to keep us now. You won’t have to pay. We’ll be gone in the morning. We’ll be gone for good.”

  Mam got up. She took her purse and hat. She turned back to look at me. “I can get rid of you without paying anything?”

  I nodded.

  She grinned. It was her stuffing-Ada-into-the – cabinet grin. “Is that a promise?” she said.

  All of my life I would remember those words.

  I said, “Yes.”

  I held Jamie and we cried and cried. His tears wet the front of my shirt and my snot got into his hair. We cried like I’d never cried before.

  It hurt so badly. The ache in my heart was worse than my foot had ever been.

  When we stopped crying I held him in my arms and rocked him back and forth. At last he looked up at me, his lashes still fringed with tears. He said, “I want to go home.”

  “We are,” I promised him. “As soon as the sun’s up, we’re going.” I could read street signs now. I could find my way. I didn’t have any money for a train fare, but I was willing to bet there would be a WVS post somewhere. The WVS women would help us out.

  I got out the birth certificates and showed Jamie his. “You were born on November 29, 1933,” I told him. “You are seven years old.” I showed him the marriage certificate too. “Our father’s name was James, just like yours.” And I took out the last piece of paper, a newspaper article. Accident at Royal Albert Dock Kills Six. “He died when you were a tiny baby. When I was just turned four.”